Wish You Well(75)

borrowed some reading material for her and Oz from the "lending library," with Estelle

McCoy's permission of course.

Louisa had taught Eugene to read when he was a child, and so Lou brought a book for

him too. He was concerned he would find no time to read it, and yet he did, late at night

under lamplight, his moistened thumb slowly turning the pages as he concentrated. Other

times Lou helped him with his words as they worked the fields in preparation for the

coming winter, or when milking the cows by kerosene lamp. Lou would take him through

the Grits and the Posts and Eugene particularly liked saying "Roooosevelt, President

Roooosevelt," a name that appeared often in the Grit pages. The cows looked at him

strangely whenever he said "Roooosevelt," as though they thought he was actually

mooing at them in a peculiar way. And Lou couldn't help but gape when Eugene asked

her why somebody would name their child President.

"You ever think about living somewhere else?" Lou asked him one morning while they

were milking.

He said, "Mountain all I seed, but I knowed they a lot mo' to this world."

"I could take you to the city one day. Buildings so tall you can't walk up them. You ride

in an elevator." He looked at her curiously. "A little car that pulls you up and down," she

explained.

"Car? What, like'n the Hudson?"

"No, more like a little room you stand in."

Eugene thought that interesting, but said he'd probably just stick to farming on the

mountain. "Want'a get hitched, have me a family, raise the chillin good."

"You'd make a good dad," she said.

He grinned. "Well, you'd be a fine ma. How you is with your brother and all."

Lou stared at him and said, "My mother was a great mom." Lou tried to recall if she had

ever actually told her mother that. Lou knew she had spent most of her adoration on her

father. It was a very troubling thought to her, since it was now beyond remedy.

A week after her ride to the school library, Lou had just finished reading to Amanda,

when she went out to the barn to be by herself. She climbed to me hayloft and sat in the

opening of the double doors and looked across the valley to the mountains beyond.

Pondering her mother's depressing future, Lou finally turned her thoughts to the loss of

Diamond. She had tried to put it out of her mind, but she realized she never really could.

Diamond's funeral had been a strange yet heartfelt affair. People had emerged from

slivers of farms and crevices of homesteads that Lou was unaware even existed, and all

these people came to Louisa's home by horse, ox, mule, foot, and tractor, and even one

battered Packard with all its doors missing. Folks trooped through with plates of good

food and jugs of cider. There were no formal preachers in attendance, but a number of

folks stood and with shy voices offered comfort for the friends of the deceased. The cedar

coffin sat in the front room, its lid securely nailed down, for no one had a desire to see

what dynamite had done to Diamond Skinner.

Lou was not sure that all the older folks were really Diamond's friends, yet she assumed

they had been friends of his father. In fact she had heard one old gent by the name of

Buford Rose, who had a head of thick white hair and few teeth, mutter about the blunt

irony of both father and son having been done in by the damn mines.

They laid Diamond to rest next to the graves of his parents, their mounds long since

pulled back into the earth. Various people read from the Bible and there were more than a

few tears. Oz stood in the center of mem all and boldly announced that his often-baptized

friend was a lock for heaven. Louisa laid a bundle of dried wildflowers in the grave,

stepped back, started to talk but then couldn't.

Cotton offered up a fine eulogy to his young friend and recited a few examples from a

storyteller he said he much admired: Jimmy "Diamond" Skinner. "In his own way," said

Cotton, "he would put to shame many of the finest taletellers of the day."

Lou said a few quiet words, addressing them really to her friend in the box under the

freshly turned dirt that smelled sweet yet sickened her. But he was not between those

planks of cedar, Lou knew. He had gone on to a place higher even than the mountains. He

was back with his father, and was seeing his mother for the very first time. He must

surely be happy. Lou raised her hand to the sky and waved good-bye once again to a

person who had come to mean so much to her, and who was now gone forever.

A few days after the burial, Lou and Oz had ventured to Diamond's tree house and took

an accounting of his belongings. Lou said Diamond would naturally want Oz to have the

bird skeleton, the Civil War bullet, the flint arrowhead, and the crude telescope.